Mittelstadt looks to be a good fit as Colorado’s second-line center, after joining the team at the trade deadline.

• Player Overview
• Comparables
• Final Analysis

The Colorado Avalanche signed Casey Mittelstadt to a three-year contract extension ahead of free agency, carrying a $5.75M cap hit. Below, we take a look at how the contract looks for the Avalanche, and whether the team is getting fair value.

Player Overview

Originally selected eighth overall by the Buffalo Sabres in 2017, it took a little while for Mittelstadt to find his footing in the NHL. Becoming a full-time NHLer in 2018, the forward had a couple slow seasons to begin his career, and even found himself back in the AHL for a good chunk of the 2019-20 season.

His production did climb a bit in limited action through the two following seasons, managing 41 points in 81 games across the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons. But it was the 2022-23 season where Mittelstadt really took a step, scoring 59 points, before sustaining that level of production through the beginning of the 2023-24 season, scoring 47 points in 62 games with Buffalo to begin the year.

However, at the trade deadline, Mittelstadt was shipped to Colorado, in exchange for defenseman Bowen Byram. Upon joining the Avalanche, the forward scored four goals and 10 points in 18 regular season games, before registering nine points in 11 playoff games.

Heading into the coming year, Mittelstadt looks poised to be a fit as Colorado’s long-term, second-line center.

Comparables

Below we’ll take a look at comparable three-year contracts to evaluate how the deal looks for the Avalanche, and whether it carries fair value. For more information on the stats/tables used below, including how the payment rate is calculated, visit the About the Site page.

With Mittelstadt turning 26 years old in November, comparables were generally kept to forwards who were between 24 and 28 years old by Dec. 31 of the first year of their contract.

For readers using mobile view, a side-to-side scrolling option is available for the table below.

3 YEARS

Mid-term deals of three or four years have become a little more popular for forwards around Mittelstadt’s age over the last few years. It’ll allow the player to build his value, while re-entering the market for a larger payout in 2027, when he’s still just in his late-20s. Comparables are below:

With the comparables, there really aren’t a ton of centers in their mid-20s who have taken three-year deals, so a lot of wingers have been included above to build a sample size. Of the 15 comparables though, all would have Mittelstadt’s projected value on a three-year deal to be between $4.2M and $6.6M.

While the comps include many projections below Mittelstadt’s $5.75M cap hit, there’s also pretty clear reasoning as to why the Danault/Bunting/Hintz projections for Mittelstadt came in so low. All three players had less than 200 career NHL games at the time of signing, while all 12 of the higher projections came from players with at least 250 games of career experience. As a result, the lowest realistic comp would’ve been the $5.15M projection from the Robby Fabbri deal.

At the same time, you can also see why Mittelstadt’s cap hit would’ve been lower than the Mangiapane and Reinhart projections on the high end. Mangiapane and Reinhart had by far the highest goal-per-82 paces in their signing year of any of the comps, which would’ve inflated their value.

That said, we still have 10 comps remaining that would all project Mittelstadt to be between $5.15M from the Fabbri deal on the low end, up to $6.25M from the Boeser contract on the high end, creating a pretty defined range of what Mittelstadt’s value should be.

Even within this range though, you also see the difference that career experience makes. Of the top three comps within that range (Boeser/Wennberg/Johansson), two of the three had over 400 career NHL games, while Boeser had well over 300. But of the seven lower comps in that range (from Toffoli to Fabbri), only one had more than 400 games played, and four had less than 300 games played.

As a result, there’s a pretty solid argument for Mittelstadt’s value on a three-year deal actually being a little higher than his $5.75M cap hit based on career experience, likely around $6M, from the Boeser, Wennberg and Johansson comps. At the very least, we can say pretty definitively that Mittelstadt wasn’t overpaid.

Below, we’ll also take a quick look at what it may have ended up costing the Avalanche if they opted for a longer-term deal, either at five/six years, or eight years.

5/6 YEARS

Based on the limited comps for a five-year deal, Mittelstadt would be sure to break into the $6M+ range.

The comps above all had very similar career experience, and each also had stronger signing year production than career production, similar to Mittelstadt. So it would just be a matter of how high Mittelstadt could go past $6M on a five-year deal, with the likely cap around the $6.65M cap hit projected from the Andrew Copp signing.

On a six-year deal, we see much higher projections for a cap hit.

Based on the comps, four of the seven would have Mittelstadt breaking into the $7M+ range. While a couple of the comps would have him between $6.25M and $6.5M (his likely range for a five-year deal), and the Kadri comp would have him even lower than his actual $5.75M cap hit, the majority of comps would have him a ways above his current cap hit.

8 YEARS

Looking at what Mittelstadt could’ve made on a maximum-term deal, projections are below.

Aside from two outliers on the high end with the contracts for Ryan Johansen and Evgeny Kuznetsov, there’s a very defined range of projections from the other comps. Of the other 10 comps, all of them would project Mittelstadt’s deal between $6.6M on the low end, and $7.5M on the high end for an eight-year contract.

What’s interesting about this is that the range isn’t wildly different from the projections for a six-year deal. So in this case, more term from a six-year deal to an eight-year deal may not have made a different in cap hit for Mittelstadt. Projections would once again have him around $7M, give or take a bit.

Final Analysis

With the three-year contract, the Avalanche get fair value. Projections from comparables would have had Mittelstadt right around a $6M cap hit for a three-year deal, so his $5.75M cap hit comes in at fair value, possibly even a little below market value.

In opting for a shorter-term deal, the Avalanche also get Mittelstadt at a reduced cap hit, compared to what he would’ve cost at a longer term, which could have been upwards of $7M per year on a deal between six and eight years.